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I’m shutting down my website which has a few thousands pages. What is the best way to remove my entire site and related pages from Google search results?

Removing full site from Google index has been discussed as a possible duplicate but the answers there show what to do with a site that still exists. Once the site is shut down, those mechanisms such as robots.txt won't be available.

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    If the site has already "been retired and shut down", does the domain still resolve? That is probably the quickest way to get your site removed from the SERPS.
    – MrWhite
    Commented Feb 7, 2019 at 17:27

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If your site is still available and you're still in control of the domain, the quickest way to delist it would be to set up the server to return a status code of 410 - Gone. That should delist it fairly quickly and you can then turn off the hosting.

Google's crawler will treat the 410 status code as a more deliberate removal status and remove the pages from their index quicker than 404s or unresolved domains.

Matt Cutts discussed this here and more recently John Mueller also covered it.

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  • What if I no longer have control of the domain? (The domain name provider seems to have disappeared without a trace...)
    – Closed Limelike Curves
    Commented Sep 21, 2023 at 22:18

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